Founder of Take Eat Easy Karim Slaoui talks business

If you live in Brussels, Paris or London, you undoubtedly know them: riding custom built single speed bicycles, green sweaters, retro cap on the head. These young guys and gals are delivering top quality food to your doorstep at insane speeds. Take Eat Easy is perhaps one of the most prolific Belgian young companies, having started in Brussels they are now rapidly expanding into different cities in Europe.

Every success story has its roots, and at the roots of this particular one is a guy called Karim Slaoui. As we have the honour of having him as a member of the jury during one of our live crowdfundings.

MyMicroInvest: What’s the next big challenge for Take Eat Easy?

Karim: Our challenges are manifold. Our main objective is to become the leader within our sector, in all the countries that we are active in - France, Spain and Belgium. We want to acquire major market share in these countries.

In France we’re going to be active in 13 cities, in Belgium in 4 and in Spain in 3 cities. And London. So we’re now looking to reaffirm our position in these cities, but moreover to be the major player. We need to be more than two times as dominant than our competitors.

Last week, we launched 3 new cities in two days! That’s very quick. It’s more a question of opportunity than of strategy.

What roles do you have in the everyday workings of the company?

I have more than one: being a founder of a company is a busy job. From the perspective of COO, a position which I share with Adrien, the objective is making the business work. Every week I’m into contact with the city managers of all the cities to make sure everything is going well and the processes are well applied. What has been thoroughly tested and validated in one city is applied to the next. This thus involves operations and giving support.

My last role would be in the product team, where I devote myself to improving the workings of our website to increase efficiency. This product perspective is a penchant of mine. I’m also working on making dispatch more and more efficient.

So every day I put a lot of effort into making the right decisions and into making sure the right people take care of the right things.

What’s the day of working at take it easy of which you have the fondest memory?

There are so many of them!

The first one must be the day we signed the papers for our first fund-raising round. That was a special day. Another one was the day when the volume of orders in Paris surpassed the volume of orders in Brussels. A day I like to remember as well is every time we reach more than 1000 orders in any new city.

A very particularly funny story, is when I enquired about our future launch in Rennes (France) and was subsequently informed that we had already launched there, a few days earlier. We had launched but the decision had been taken without me: as I was not needed. It was the team in Nantes, a city next to Rennes, that had taken the lead in launching our business in Rennes. For me, this shows that our operations are well oiled.

The fact that we are now able to launch in 3 cities in two days, is also an important progress, because it shows that we have massively made progress in comparison to not-even-so-long-ago, where it took us 3 months to launch in a new city.

Thanks Karim!

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